RUSH: So the president once again is attempting to upstage me. It’s no accident, ladies and gentlemen, that his press availabilities start at noon on the days he decides to do them, or between noon and three on the days he decides to do them. I think the purpose of this press availability was to talk about guns and children and announcing Biden as the guy that is gonna be in charge of the regime’s efforts to end gun violence.

But every question from the media is about the fiscal cliff. Every one. And Obama just got through making a case again for tax increases on the rich and he said, “You know, look, I’m one of these people…” You ever notice how the rich talk about how rich they are? Democrats talk about how rich they are. I mean, Clinton, Obama, they never let a day go by without reminding everybody. Obama said, “Hey, look, you know what?

“I’m in this group. My taxes are gonna have to go up. I wish they weren’t.” (laughing) I’m sitting here watching this and I’m just mesmerized. He says somebody else is raising his taxes and there’s nothing he can do about it. “My taxes are going up. I really wish they weren’t, but, you know, I understand there are things bigger than me. I think of the people out there who are really working, and they may be holding down two or three jobs.

“And we gotta do more for ’em, and that’s why we need a balanced approach. That’s why we’ve gotta raise taxes on the rich. The rich are gonna have to pay a little more, do more for their fair share. We gotta do something for the working people.” What is that gonna do for the working people? It’s gonna penalize them. The “little guy” is gonna get creamed here if you start raising everybody’s taxes, particularly taxes on people that do the hiring and firing.

I’m blue in the face.

It doesn’t matter.

You know, the truth of anything doesn’t matter anymore. What’s right doesn’t matter. What makes economic common sense doesn’t matter. I’m blue in the face over it. I get point I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. Here. Here’s Richard Stengel. Grab the sound bites. Do we have time to squeeze this in here? You know what? I want to wait ’cause I have two sound bites here and want to play ’em back-to-back.

I don’t have enough time here to play ’em back-her-back. But it’s Richard Stengel, who is the editor of TIME Magazine, explaining why they chose Obama. And it’s a giant El Rushbo See, I Told You So. Stengel (and you will hear it coming up) essentially says that they chose Obama because he is a symbol, the champion of the new low-information American. It’s kinda funny to listen to it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay. So it just happened again. I’m telling you: I don’t care what I read; I don’t care what I hear. It’s all wrong. No matter where I go. Sports page, business page, my tech blogs. (My beloved tech blogs.) A couple of them were just absolutely reprehensibly bad. Obama just now. (paraphrased) “You know, in this deal, what the Republicans are gonna have to do is take me out of the equation, ’cause really their problem is they just don’t want me to win.

“They gotta start putting the people of this country first. They gotta take me out of the equation. The biggest problem in these negotiations is that they’re talking to me. They don’t like me so much, they don’t want me to win so much, that they’re willing to screw the country or something.” Those are not his exact words, but he said, “Look, they’re getting everything they want. They’re getting $2 trillion spending cuts.”

Nurse! Nurse! Please, somebody help me here.

It’s $2 trillion in spending cuts! He actually said it. “They’re getting $2 trillion spending cuts. We’re gonna have a trillion dollars in new revenue.” I said, ‘Somebody call the doctor. Somebody call an ambulance. I need help! I can’t deal with this and stay focused anymore.” A $2 trillion spending cut. He said, “There will be $2 trillion in spending cuts at the end of it.”

I said, “What the hell does that mean? Does that mean what I think it means?”

Yes, it probably does.

He’s promising $2 trillion of spending cuts in years nine and ten of the ten-year deal. Well, anything beyond year one in a ten-year deal is irrelevant. You can only make a budget deal for one year and then you have a new Congress. At most it’s two years. Then you get a new Congress; you get a new year. They’re one-year deals. There’s no such thing as a ten-year deal. It’s a blueprint but there’s no deal for ten years.

If there was a ten-year deal we could send Congress home for ten years, which might not be a bad idea. But still, it’s not going to happen. There aren’t $2 trillion in spending cuts. Obama has not offered $2 trillion in spending cuts, but he’s out there telling the media, “Yup, $2 trillion. They’re getting everything they want! Plus a trillion dollars in new revenue.” Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter where you go.

Nothing, nothing is right.

So here’s Richard Stengel on the Today Show today with the big announcement. Dadelut dadelut dadelut dadelut dadelut! The Man of the Year. A failing magazine with a dwindling subscription and a dwindling advertiser base that’s no longer relevant in the media world, still holds onto this Man of the Year thing. The cohost is Savannah Guthrie and the fill-in host is David Gregory, ’cause I guess Matt Lauer…

I don’t know. I think he was still trying to chase Anne Hathaway. Did you hear what he did to Anne Hathaway? Did you hear about this? You know, Anne Hathaway had a wardrobe malfunction. Anne Hathaway, the actress, was in The Devil Wears Prada. Then she was Catwoman in the latest Batman. She showed up at some premiere, red carpet thing getting out of the car, and it was easily seen she wasn’t wearing panties.

So you know what the view was if you could tell she wasn’t wearing panties. So it was highly embarrassing. Everybody ran the pictures of it, and on her next appearance on the Today Show, Matt Lauer said, “Well, we’ve sure been seeing a lot of you lately.” She dealt with it pretty well, pretty gracefully. But anyway, he wasn’t there. Savannah Guthrie and Gregory were hosting, and here is Richard Stengel announcing Obama as the Person of the Year.

STENGEL: Our Person of the Year for 2012 is … President Barack Obama.

GREGORY: Oh, wow!

STENGEL: He won reelection despite a higher unemployment rate than anybody’s had to face in 70 years. He’s the first Democrat to actually win two consecutive terms with over 50% of the vote. That’s something we haven’t seen since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And he’s basically the beneficiary and the author of a kind of new America, a new demographic, a new cultural America that, ummm, he is now the symbol of.

RUSH: Yeah, what’s that, I wonder?

So he won despite a higher unemployment rate than anybody had to face in 70 years. Yeah, because it was Bush’s fault. In spite of the unemployment rate! (laughing) “And he’s the beneficiary and the author of a kind of new America! A new demographic, a new cultural America that he’s now the symbol of.” So Gregory said, “Well, what about some people who’ve pushed back on that this year, saying it was more about the lesser of two evils in the course of the campaign? A lot of circumstances seem to be bigger than the president compared to when he was first elected.”

I have no idea what that question means, but here’s the answer…

STENGEL: Our story by Michael Scherer, our White House correspondent, really probes deeply into the “data folks” at the White House who really help make it happen. And one of the things they found out is there’s about 15% of voters who actually don’t care about politics. These are the people we didn’t know who are gonna show up at the polls who actually like Barack Obama, in the sense they feel like he’s outside of politics.

RUSH: And that’s it. That’s why he’s Man of the Year. That’s the new demographic. Yeah, we’ve been making jokes here about the low-information voter, and it turns out TIME Magazine honors Obama ’cause he got ’em. He turned low-information, apathetic voters into people who vote. “These are the people we didn’t know who are gonna show up at the polls who actually like Barack Obama, in the sense they feel like he’s outside of politics.”

We’ve never had a more radical, we’ve never had a more partisan politician in the White House than Obama. It’s only a low-information voter (we used to have call ’em “morons”) that could think he’s outside of politics, but there you have it. There you have it. TIME Magazine: We chose Obama because he’s a symbol of the new, low-information America. That’s what Stengel meant when he talked about Obama being “the beneficiary and the author of a kind of new America, a new demographic, a new cultural America that he is now the symbol of.”

I wonder what these elite Democrats really think about that. So this guy’s Man of the Year because idiots love him? Because believe me, they think low-information voters are idiots. I guarantee you. They’ll be glad to take their votes. The new stupid America? That should have been Man of the Year. Person of the Year: Stupid people. The low-information voter should have been the Person of the Year.